November 27th, 2007

How-To Tuesday: Greening Your Home

Posted by Jason Pelletier, Low Impact Living

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If you’re reading this blog, we suspect that you’re either thinking about or in the midst of greening your home. Believe it or not, building green into a new home or a major remodeling project is often easier than starting with an existing home - your choices are somewhat defined, and you can find more sources of information each day. But what if you want to start making changes simply for the sake of reducing your environmental impact? Where should you start? In this piece, I’ll share my perspective on where to stick that green toe in the water.

Over the past year, I’ve had the opportunity to visit many different families to help them create more eco-friendly homes. More often than not, their first questions are “How can I install solar panels?” or “What are the best options for green countertops”? Very relevant and laudable questions to be sure, but ones with fairly expensive answers! While we at Low Impact Living help with questions like these, we also try to help people understand that they can make many simpler changes that protect the planet and save money - money that they can use to fund those larger projects.

Typically, we recommend that people make changes in a particular sequence. As an example, everyone wants a tankless or solar hot water heater. But if you install one before you install low-flow showerheads, faucet aerators, and Energy Star clotheswashers and dishwashers, you’ll likely be buying one that is 50-100% bigger and more expensive than what you truly need. So, we recommend a four-step process for greening a home:

1.  Make the easy changes that are free or inexpensive and offer major benefits. In almost every home we visit, nearly 10-20% of the possible savings come from simple, free changes in behavior. Examples include reducing the temperature of a hot water heater, shutting off all lights when you leave a room, unplugging electronic devices when not in use, and turning off the tap when you’re brushing your teeth. Another 20% can come from projects that are inexpensive or that pay for themselves in a very short period of time. Tops on this list are installing compact fluorescent lighting, installing efficient showerheads and sink aerators, and insulating your hot water heater.

2.  Upgrade key appliances or home systems such as home insulation or energy-efficient windows. If you live in a very cold or very hot part of the country, then upgrading your insulation and windows or installing an efficient furnace might make sense. In more temperate areas, you should probably start by upgrading to Energy Star (or better) appliances. We often focus on the clotheswasher - it is a quadruple-whammy! You save energy, carbon dioxide (via saved energy), fresh water, and sewage production, all in one project. Because these projects are more expensive, it often pays to run some numbers first to find the best ones for your situation - we find the calculators on the Energy Star website, the Home Energy Saver calculator, and yes, our own Environmental Impact Calculator at Low Impact Living to be good places to start. Oh, and many states and utilities offer generous subsidies for these projects - you can find a complete list organized by state at the DSIRE website, www.dsireusa.org.

3.  Install “renewable” systems. Solar PV (electric), solar hot water, wind energy, greywater systems - these projects bring a sparkle to any green homeowner’s eye! They do have amazing benefits but are still quite expensive. They do pay for themselves over time (and often in less time than you would think), but they still require an up-front investment of thousands of dollars. We can’t wait for the day when prices come down so that many of us can produce our own power and treat and reuse our own wastewater at home. Until then, though, do yourself a favor and start with the upgrades mentioned above first - as I said earlier, you can really cut the price of these systems by up to 50% if you invest a little bit in some carefully chosen projects before hand.

4.  Purchase offsets for whatever is left over. Offsets are a great way to cancel out that last remaining portion of your carbon footprint or to neutralize the emissions from your recent cross-country flight. But offsets aren’t the answer to global warming - why pay someone else to reduce their carbon footprint for you when there are so many great and inexpensive ways to do it in your own home? Also, carbon offsets are just carbon - they don’t clean up your indoor air, make your home more comfortable, or save multiple environmental resources like most green home projects do. And, they don’t save you money. There’s nothing more satisfying than making some changes in your own home and seeing the difference in lower utility bills several months later.

Which brings me to my last point: start everything by getting to know your utility bills. How much does your electricity, natural gas / heating oil, and water actually cost you? How do they vary by season? By tracking them through time, you’ll start to see some interesting changes and opportunities to cut back - that summer AC or winter heating “bump”, the way that your electricity use will increase as the hours of winter darkness increase, or that summer irrigation bulge caused by your thirsty lawn. Mark down when you do major projects, and look for changes in your next bills. As a green homeowner, there’s nothing more satisfying than actually seeing your load on the planet lighten with each passing month!

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